Cybersecurity starts with a change of approach in how companies and businesses deal with incidences. The hackers will work on the weaknesses that exist in company structure and policies to gain entry. They will rely on the bad habits that the employees have maintained all along to be able to break in quickly. We are the people who make the hackers’ work a lot easier when we set passwords that are too easy to crack.
Whenever there is a hacking attack, the hackers’ challenges become too simple, and they end up causing a lot more damage before they are noticed. Cybersecurity at the workplace keeps the information that your business or company works with secure and confidential. You must follow some rules and enforce some regulations to ensure that you can maintain high-security standards. Always ensure that you give the hackers a run for their data by ensuring that your company has strict regulations and policies against poor security habits.
Your digital systems should also be up-to-standard in how well they can enforce security. Your applications should ask for a second means of authentication when there is suspicion with the login. Any user accessing an information system at your company should also provide more evidence that will prove their identity.
Additionally, it is also essential that you enforce levels of information access to restrict how much information each employee can access. When all the individuals in your company can access all the information, there is no need to protect this information. The applications that you use should restrict the users that have permissions to carry out particular operations on your information and see restricted sections of the applications.
When your company abides by the rules and policies you have set, you will give the hacker a more significant challenge to work with. Since you are well organized and keen on enforcing strict information access restrictions, the hacker will move to an easier target. Strict adherence to security standards is one of the most important ways to ensure that hackers do not have an easy time breaking into your company’s information systems.
Whenever you have fired an employee, you should also ensure that you have purged their digital accounts and made their access credentials unusable. This will prevent them from getting back to your servers and carrying out a revenge attack on your systems. Following are some of the best ways to enforce cybersecurity best practices in your business or company.
- People
People are the main point of defense for your company’s or business information. They form a barrier against attacks that hackers might invent up for your business. Whenever you have people who are ready to follow the rules and keep your information secure, the hackers will not get past them. Hackers usually make use of social engineering to break the human barrier in the protection of information.
However, training people and making them aware of social engineering and the impact that it can have on the security of their information. They should be made aware that while they are communicating with another party, they will be more likely to pass on sensitive information. As such, they should ensure that they watch the information they reveal over phone calls.
The employees you have at your workplace should also be given strict instructions on good passwords. This will ensure that they match up the standards you have set concerning information protection, and they do not set weak passwords. It would be best if you also had daemons running regularly through the programs and information systems to ensure that any password that is older than a necessary period is reset immediately.
Resetting old passwords on your end will prompt the employee to ask for a new password. It will also reveal to you which of your employees keeps up with the password requirements and who is still lagging. Being strict on the passwords that can be used at your company will ensure that the hackers do not have an easy time guessing the passwords. Hackers are known to use brute-force techniques when they want to get into your information systems forcefully.
Hackers will brute force their way through many credential pages on your web applications and internal systems. However, the best way to ensure that your information is protected from the inside is to be strict on the use of passwords. Ensure that there is no reuse of passwords, and whenever passwords are set, they should also be made to expire.
Like tokens used in oAuth and other login methods, the passwords should also have an expiry period. This makes the passwords more effective, in addition to adding their value in keeping your information secure.
Lock the hackers out by ensuring that you give your employees fresh passwords and login tokens each week. This will make their start of the week more refreshing, and they will have a constant source of new passwords to work with. Additionally, the new passwords will ensure that the employees do not reuse any of their authentications.
In their work, the employees will use fresh passwords to fight monotony and boredom, bringing several psychological benefits. The people you work with are the best protection you have against hackers, and their behavior will determine how strong they will hold on. Maintaining safe and secure password habits will ensure that your employees are always aware of the current working protocols for security, keeping their information safe.
When you train your employees to reuse passwords, they will also expect new changes in the office, such as new chairs and laptops every few months, which will be a great way to keep them energetic and productive.
Engaging with your employees regularly on these habits will also keep them constantly aware of their information security and what steps they are supposed to take to ensure that information is safe.
Employees should also be trained on how to deal with inquiries for information. In your penetration testing, ensure that you have included social engineering as one of the units. Not only will this expose them to the various ways social engineers use to access information of a restricted nature, but it will also remind them never to give out information unless they have a way of confirming who they are giving it to.
It is much better to ask for an email address to send the requested information than to pass on the information over the phone. Social engineers are constantly upping their ante by researching the names of individuals in high ranks within a company. When the name of a department head is dropped casually into a phone conversation, the employee will be convinced to drop their guard.
This is the aim of the social engineer, and it makes the employees play right into their hands. When the employees have sufficient training on the tricks that hackers are expected to play on them in phone calls and other interactions, they will be more cautious when conversing on the phone.
Identity management for your employees is something that you should worry about as the management of the company. Without a doubt, your company uses a lot of applications that are all related to each other. For instance, you might have a customer relationship management app on the company intranet used together with the company email software to send invoices and other messages to the customers and partners of the company.
Authenticating into a whole load of apps can be a bit stressful for the employees, and it is crucial that as management, you get this burden off their minds. The employees should be able to authenticate once and have access to all the applications they interact with in their work. With single sign-on and federated identity management, you will have made authentication less stressful for your employees. This will make their time much more straightforward, and they will not have to worry about passwords or getting re-authenticated into every app they have to interact with in the course of their daily work.
Employees carry devices with them to work, and you should have a policy for this. Bring-your-own-device has been a company policy for a long time and has been a determinant of whether employees should carry their devices with them or not. Additionally, it determines the kind of work that the employees can do from their devices’ comfort. Despite the convenience that bring-your-own-device presents to a company, it still carried some level of risk.
If an employee carries their devices with them to work and connects to the company WiFi, what measures do you have to ensure that their connection does not link to the rest of the company network?
Taking care of these eventualities is essential for dealing with hackers, and an infected device can be the cause of downfall for an entire company. Your company policies and regulations should be able to take care of employees bringing their own devices with them and the restrictions placed on these devices.
People should also be trained to recognize early signs of a cyber attack. When you make your employees aware of the signs of a cyber attack, they will be more aware of these signs and alert the management when they notice that something is off. Additionally, train your employees to keep their software up to date.
The first thing they should do once they have changed their passwords at the start of the week should be to check for new updates to the software applications that they use in their work. Alternatively, you can also make their workplace safer by doing the updates yourself. Your IT technical team can help you set up automated updates for your applications and operating systems, reducing the amount of software-related work that your employees will need to do.
By reducing technical work for your employees, they will remember their passwords, and their interaction with the software will be for work purposes only. For this reason, they will be a lot more productive, which will bring in more revenue for your company.
The reactions that your employees have in the event of an actual cyber attack determine how well you will deal with it. When there is a cyber-attack, an employee who panics is more likely to leak information about the incidence, which has a vast publicity consequence. Additionally, when your employees are calm when an unfortunate hacking incident occurs at the workplace, you will be able to deal with it much better.
Calm employees mean that you will be able to trace the hacker much faster, and there will be no confusion whenever a hack has taken place at the workplace. Train your employees on the procedures to follow when there is a cyber attack on your information systems and data processing infrastructure. This will not only keep your company running smoothly, but it is also one of the ways that you can ensure that nothing gets to the public before being reviewed.
Train your employees on the best way to defend against hackers and ensure that you empower them with information about social engineering and safe password practices. Your employees’ better password practices will give the hacker a more challenging time when they attempt your system. When you refresh the passwords each week, the leaking of a password will not mean much for the company, as the new passwords will be in place when the leaked or stolen information can be used.
Set expiry on your passwords and make use of tokens to ease app access across multiple platforms. When you do this, you will have created one of the most potent defenses against hackers. The hackers will not be able to get past the people you have at your company, which will keep your information safe and secure.
- Applications
Do you regularly update the software that you use? What processes are used in choosing new software for your company? Do you get the software off the shelf, or do you have it tailor-made by specialized software engineers? Knowing where your software comes from is as important as being able to use it safely. You should be aware of the vendor that gives you the software you use and the reputation they have been maintaining over the years.
When you are getting new software, ensure that you consult directly with the vendor to get what you deserve. The software that you get for your company should be approved and authorized for safe and effective use. It should also be tested to ensure that it carries out the function that you intended for it.
Whenever you are getting new software for your company, you should also be aware of its ease of use and how fast the employees will get familiar with it. Ease of use means that the other safety features in your software will be in place, and there will be no need to spend a lot of time getting the employees to use the software effectively.
Whenever you are getting new software for your company, do you take the time to ask around and research yourself? Do you scour the internet looking for reviews by other companies and organizations that have also been using the same applications that you intend to get for your company?
It is much better to be informed before making any software purchase decisions for your company than getting software from a suspicious vendor who will end up selling your leaked information to hackers and the dark web.
The new software should be vetted by your management and given a trial run before being accepted to your company. Testing the application will ensure that you are more familiar with its features and capabilities before accepting it for use by your company.
Encryption is a feature of modern applications that ensures that information is kept safe and secure even while it is moving. When you get applications that can encrypt information, you will be making it a lot harder for the hackers to get the accurate information hidden in the gibberish.
The hackers will also have a more challenging time breaking into your software applications when you have the information encrypted. By encrypting the information, you will be making it virtually useless for the other parties that might manage to get a hold of it.
Encryption is a requirement for many modern applications, and whenever you are getting new software for your company, you should ask if it supports encryption of the information. When you get software that can encrypt the information that it is working with, you will keep your information private and confidential.
Even in the unfortunate event that some of the information leaks from your company, the fact that it is encrypted will ensure that the people who get it will not determine the true nature of the information.
Applications should be able to establish sessions for use by the users. They should also ask for a password each time an employee comes back to their desk after a break. When you have tokens that expire after a period of inactivity, you will be able to seal your information and ensure that all your applications are secure.
No information will be visible from the outside world when you have tokens that can expire, and as a company, you will be more in charge of your applications. The use of sessions and passwords will also monitor the use of the applications and the access to the information. When you have passwords to deter unauthorized use, you will also ensure that each employee has a way of securing their desk when they walk away from it.
The use of sessions will also make access control much easier for your company. You will keep track of the moments when the employees were actively interacting with the application and when they had logged out. With this information, you will be able to track the use of the application and the changes made to the information while the employees are interacting with it.
The software used at your company should also restrict modifications to the information and access to certain portions of it. When you have software that can quickly determine the user’s rank and lock or unlock certain sections of the software, you will be able to secure your information better. Whenever a hacker has access to a low-level account at your company, they will not be able to do much damage to the information since you have restricted what is possible with such an account.
Additionally, the use of access restrictions based on the rank and authority of the users ensures that as you interact with the software, you know your limits. A low-level user will not go snooping around where they should not, and there will be mutual respect for the information.
Additionally, the higher level users of the applications will be responsible for a lot of what goes on with the software. If any significant changes have been made to the information, the lower management will be kept out of the loop.
Industry-standard encryption protocols should secure applications to ensure that the information is always safe. The use of encryption is recommended for companies and businesses dealing with sensitive information. Keeping these applications updated is also another way to enhance cybersecurity in the workplace.
The update settings for all the applications that you use at the workplace should be set to automatic. Since your work computers are always connected to the internet, they will fetch the updates that they need for themselves. The moment the software vendor releases new updates, you will also receive and install these updates, which will ensure that your software is safe and secure. The use of software updates makes your applications stronger and more capable of defending against hackers.
The hackers are closely studying the software used at the workplace, and when they know what software you use, they will study it a lot. Knowledge of the software also means that they will be looking for any vulnerabilities that develop in the software. Vulnerabilities are the weaknesses in the software which make the software easier to hack into. The hacker will break into software when they have a vulnerability that they can exploit.
Getting software with long-term support is highly recommended for many companies that need the best applications for their employees. Long-term support means that the vendor will be providing support and updates to the software for a longer duration. As such, the company can be assured that they can use the software for much longer without worrying about it.
Software that does not have long-term support cannot be guaranteed to be secured, and the users will find it less secure. Additionally, the company will not have any assurance that the software will serve their needs as the lack of long-term support means that they will not receive regular updates.
Regular updates are significant for the company, and the users will be able to strengthen the security they put up for their information with better software. As such, the choice of software will factor into the overall preparedness of a company for hackers. It will ensure that the company can keep its functions and operations more secure.
Software is the second phase in ensuring that your company is prepared for any cyber attack. When you use the latest applications, you will be able to deter the hackers as they will not find weaknesses and flaws in the software fast enough. However, when you are running outdated software at your company, the hackers will be able to find many more vulnerabilities of the application in less time which also means that they will have greater chances of success hacking into older software.
Your software should be constantly updated to ensure that it is patched up and strong enough to handle the attacker’s moves. Whenever you are considering migrating your data and processes, you should also think of upgrading the software that is being used at your company to ensure that hackers no longer have a means of building back doors into the software that you use and monitoring all your activity from the comfort of their remote servers.
Whenever you are upgrading your company and making shifts across the company, be sure to get the best software to power your data processing. The new software will be a lot stronger and safer for your employees and keep your information secure from all kinds of attacks.
Better software means that your company will have an easier time processing information, and the interaction with the applications will also be more straightforward. When you cannot find software that matches your requirements and policies in the market, it is much better to get a software company to make software that matches your exact needs.
This software will be branded as your own, and you will be the boss, specifying precisely what you need the software to be capable of. When you are getting tailor-made applications for your company, ensure that you specify the security features that you want to have in the software. Additionally, ask for the developers to follow secure coding practices or give them a template to work with to ensure that your company regulations and policies are used when developing the software applications.
When you have made this possible, you will keep your software safe and secure against all forms of attacks. Tailor-made software is much better in the sense that you can secure it better on your own, and you get to specify everything you want to be thrown into the mix, which makes it something that you will appreciate.
- Processes
The processes and procedures you have at your company determine how ready you are for a cyber attack. Are you prepared for when the hackers strike? Are you ready to lose data? Do you think that there are any loopholes in your company’s regulations and policies that will make it easier for a hacker to break into your information systems?
The people and the processes at your company work together to ensure that you uphold high-security standards and keep all your people well-coordinated together. For instance, who is supposed to report to who there are issues with the security of the information that the employees are dealing with? If they receive a phone call from a social engineer, how are they supposed to behave?
In case you are hacked, how will you react to the attack? What will be your immediate steps to the hacking, and what will you do to ensure that the hacking does not cause any further damage? Are you insured for hackers, and is your company fully prepared for cybersecurity incidents? Knowing all this will prove to be very valuable for your company.
It will help you make changes to your company structure to better prepare for hackers and other cybersecurity challenges. The protocol you have set up at your company will be the guiding factor when you’re hacked, and it will also prevent your company from falling to pieces when you are under a devastating cyber attack. Just like preparedness for natural disasters requires some protocol to be in place, a cyber attack should also have a matching protocol.
The protocol will dictate everything that will occur while you are under attack, the parties that will be informed, and any other requirements. For instance, will your employees go home when you are under a cyber attack? Will they be allowed to use social media for the duration that you are dealing with the attack.
Being private about the cyber-attacks had helped many companies keep their calm when they were attacked. Additionally, it has also ensured that they kept their face and handled the news’s release to the public in a more confident manner. The company’s management should reveal or disclose the information about the hacking incident to the public in a professional manner.
They should not panic and throw everyone into confusion about the safety of their information. Handling the public is also a sensitive matter that holds tremendous impact. Whenever you have been hacked, you should get all your facts right to avoid misinforming the public. Was any of the information leaked to the hackers? Were any critical systems halted or broken into? Arranging all this information and creating an organized press release will make your company appear professional and more experienced in handling cybersecurity issues that crop up.
When you have the proper processes and procedures in place, reacting to cybersecurity and maintaining the levels of security for your information will be very easy. You will no longer have to worry about the chain of command to be followed every time there has been a break-in.
Additionally, you will also be able to keep your employees calm and more capable of handling the stress and pressure of being hacked. A hacking incident can be very stressful for your employees, and when you have them prepared for the worst, they will be more calm and helpful when you have been hacked. It is also essential that you have these processes in place to ensure that the events that happen during and after a cyber incident are organized and professional in their manner.
Proper processes are also required when you are dealing with partners in your company. Logistic companies, software vendors, and other partners will need to have their own set of rules on how they should be handled and treated at your company. When you can deal with these parties professionally, interacting with them will be much easier.
It will also make consultation more professional for both parties, and whenever you need favor with the software you use or a change in any of the processes you have been used to, getting what you need will be very easy. The companies you deal with will also need to be vetted to ensure that they also follow the proper protocols whenever dealing with information and software systems. They will know what to do in reaction to various events, and this will make reacting to cybersecurity incidences a lot easier for your company.
Cybersecurity and Companies
Companies that are well prepared and more organized will keep their information more secure in the event of a cybersecurity intrusion. The hackers that break into information systems will have a more challenging time when the company has been informed about the present threat of the hackers. Your company employees will also get to prepare better for all the means and methods used by the hackers when they try to obtain information from the company.
As a result, your company will stay secure from hackers by not giving them any information to work with. The hackers will no longer find an easy way into your information systems when you have set password rules and policies for your employees. With the routine reset of passwords in your company, your employees will ensure that the hackers do not have an easy time breaking into your information systems.
Preparation is the best weapon, and when it comes to cyber-warfare, it is much better to be fully prepared and armed to the T. Your software applications must always be the latest version. Updates should be automatic for all your software. Working with vendors you can trust will also ensure that you can keep the hackers away from your information systems.
The vendor will be responsible for maintenance and dealing with any issues you might face whenever you use their software. They should always be available when you need to consult them on some issues, and whenever you need updates and patches to your software, you can rely on them. Integration of the software with other platforms and new infrastructure will also require the software vendor’s support, who will be able to give you the steps that you need to follow to ensure that your software is working with the other applications you use at your company.
When you are dealing with a reliable software vendor, you will keep your company working more effectively, and the software will no longer need to be an issue for you. The vendor will also ensure that you get specialized and personalized service to ensure that your company uses the software to the fullest.
Staying on guard starts with keeping your employee army ready for any incoming tricks of the social engineers and hackers. Policies and regulations ensure that all the rules you have put in place to uphold your high standards of information security are followed. When your employees are a strong defense for your information, the rest of the protection is automated, and you will no longer have to worry about getting woken up in the middle of the night following a break into your information systems.
Whenever you have a credible information protection strategy to work with, you also get to secure your information better. A system in place also means that you have something that you can work with, review and constantly revise to ensure that your systems are safe and secure. A policy that can be revised ensures that you can upgrade your workplace policies and working practices in response to any changes in the cybersecurity landscape. When you are working with a robust set of rules for keeping your information secure, you will also safeguard your company against any loss of information.
Cybersecurity is a growing concern for the modern world as hackers are getting better, and their methods are becoming more sophisticated. Regardless, it is much better to be more prepared, as being well prepared will give the hackers a more challenging time when they try to break into your system. Whenever you are safeguarding your information systems, you will easily keep the hackers out through proven methods and strategies that will ensure that your data does not get stolen.
Some other methods, such as encrypting your data, will ensure that the hackers do not find out what all the information you have at your company is about. The use of solid encryption standards keeps the information unknown to the outside entities and only usable within your company. As such, you will be able to keep everything within your company. The hackers will not find out what you are doing in your company even when they are lucky enough to intercept some of the information while in transit.
